Pen and Ink Witchcraft

by Calloway, Colin G.

  At the Treaty of Hard Labor in October 1768, John Stuart and the Cherokees confirmed a new boundary approved by the Board of Trade.126 Starting at Fort Chiswell, the terminal point of a boundary negotiated between Governor William Tryon of North Carolina and the Cherokees the year before, the treaty continued the boundary to the Ohio at the mouth of the Kanawha River. The treaty completed the Virginia section of the boundary although no Virginian representatives attended. In November, Stuart negotiated a boundary treaty with the Creeks at Augusta in Georgia.127 But the unauthorized Stanwix cession of lands beyond the Kanawha threw the southern boundary issue into confusion. Virginians petitioned for an extension of the southern boundary to bring it into line with the Stanwix boundary, and the governor of Virginia, Lord Botetort, promptly dispatched Andrew Lewis and Thomas Walker to Stuart to negotiate a new boundary with the Cherokees.128 At the Treaty of Lochaber in October 1770 one thousand Cherokees agreed to shift the boundary farther west, so that it ran from the mouth of the Kanawha to the Holston River. “We never had such Talks formerly but now all our Talks are about Lands,” the Cherokee chief Attakullakulla reflected ruefully. Surveyors running the line in the summer of 1771 deviated from the agreement, and the next year John Donelson secured a new deal from Attakullakulla that moved the boundary west to the Kentucky River. The new line still did not meet up with the Stanwix line or give Virginians all they wanted but it did secure for Virginia an additional ten million acres in what is today eastern Kentucky and West Virginia.129 Now the southern treaties confused the boundary issue in the North. Surely Botetort had no authority to grant lands beyond the Appalachians in defiance of the Proclamation of 1763, William Franklin wrote his father. “It also seems improbable to me, that the Crown should, thro’ Lord Botetort, give the Virginians Leave to purchase of the southern Indians the very Land which the Crown had before purchased of the Six Nations.”130

  The Treaty at Fort Stanwix marked the end of an era in Virginian-Iroquois relations. For almost a century, Virginian colonists had relied on alliance with the Iroquois for security against the French and to build their own power. As the colony grew, boundary lines with the Iroquois were negotiated in 1684, 1722, and at the Treaty of Lancaster in 1744. Fort Stanwix was the last time colonial Virginians and Six Nations chiefs met in council. After 1768, Virginians regarded the Iroquois as “simply another Indian group that impeded the speedy settlement of western lands.”131

  Lord Hillsborough was furious that Johnson had ignored his instructions in order to extend the boundary west, thereby undermining the agreements Stuart had reached with the southern tribes.132 The Board of Trade looked into the matter and reprimanded Johnson for ignoring his orders and allowing “the claims and interests of private persons to mix themselves in this Negotiation.”133 Johnson acknowledged in correspondence with William Franklin that his friendship with the suffering traders might have caused him “to espouse their cause,” but he had only done what the government had already approved and he had “acted on the most equitable as well as disinterested principles.”134

  In any case, the Iroquois grant to the traders was worthless without confirmation by the imperial government. Having achieved their goals in America, Samuel Wharton and William Trent sailed for England early in 1769 to head off rivals with competing claims and “have the final Stroke given to the Grant.” They carried letters of introduction to well-placed people, and they relied on Benjamin Franklin for guidance and advice. Wharton spent years in London, cultivating friends in high places and promoting his schemes. “He has acquired better connections here, than any American that I know of, ever did,” wrote one business associate. In Peter Marshall’s assessment, he was “energetic, persuasive and above all unscrupulous.” The original group of Philadelphia merchants expanded to include British politicians and speculators, and the claim for reparations for losses in the Indian trade became absorbed into a much larger project that reached the highest levels of government. The suffering traders joined forces with the Ohio Company and formed a new consortium known as the Grand Ohio Company or the Walpole Associates (Benjamin Franklin involved the British politicians Thomas and Richard Walpole). The company first petitioned the Privy Council for a grant of 2,400,000 acres to be carved out of the lands ceded to the Crown at Fort Stanwix. The Privy Council referred the petition to the Board of Trade; after a five-month delay the board approved it in December 1769. By that time, the company was scheming to develop a new western colony in the ceded lands south of Ohio, and it petitioned for a grant of twenty million acres within the Stanwix cession that would have swallowed up the Indiana grant. They initially called the proposed colony “Pittsylvania” in honor of William Pitt but, hoping to win royal support, changed the name to Vandalia, in honor of Queen Charlotte, who was reputed to be descended from Vandals. Hillsborough attempted to obstruct the project but Wharton and Franklin won over influential people. The Lords of the Treasury approved the twenty-million-acre grant in 1770; the Privy Council approved the Vandalia proposal in 1772, and Hillsborough fell from power to be replaced by the Earl of Dartmouth. But Vandalia never became a reality. Opposition from rival interest groups—Virginian speculators with eyes on the same lands also had connections in London—continued to delay progress and the Quebec Act of 1774 placed supervision of western territory in the hands of the governor-general of Canada, leaving the speculators involved in the Grand Ohio Company and the Vandalia project empty-handed. Relations between Wharton and the Franklins strained and then broke. When Benjamin Franklin left England in 1775 “eleven years of lobbying for various land-speculating ventures had netted him absolutely nothing.” Then the Revolution changed everything and Wharton’s and Croghan’s schemes “were among the first casualties of the war.”135

  Croghan had hoped that the Treaty at Fort Stanwix would secure his fortune and his future, and he leveraged loans on the basis of land granted to him and the suffering traders. But his plans soon ran into trouble. Laid up by a severe attack of gout and a dislocated foot in the summer of 1769, he traveled by wagon to Johnson Hall when he heard that the government was unlikely to confirm the private transactions Johnson had written into the treaty.136 The following February he was confined to his bed; an acquaintance described him as “a Poor Soul” who did “nothing but pray and talk about the Sufferings of the Inner Man,” and occasionally sighed in regret “about the Tricks of his Youth.”137 In the spring, fearing an Indian war was imminent, Croghan hurried to Fort Pitt to try and sell off the merchandise and buildings he owned there, presumably to someone less aware of the impending catastrophe. He then set up a private land office in Pittsburgh, selling land titles to anyone who would buy them, liquidating his claims as quickly as possible to try and pay off his debts.138

  One of the individuals interested in making a purchase was George Washington. Washington had told a friend, the fellow land speculator and agent William Crawford, in 1767 that he regarded the proclamation line of 1763 as no more than “a temporary expedient to quiet the Minds of the Indians & [one that] must fall of course in a few years especially when those Indians are consenting to our Occupying the Lands.” Anyone who missed “the present opportunity of hunting out good Lands & in some Measure Marking & distinguishing them for their own (in order to keep others from settling them)” would never get another chance. Through Crawford, Washington consulted Croghan about purchasing fifteen thousand acres. He also considered buying Croghan’s interest in the Walpole Company but finally decided it was too shaky. Washington did acquire, by grants, some of the lands claimed by Croghan, and he later had to resort to litigation to reinforce his rights to the land.139 The government’s procrastination and ultimate rejection of the Vandalia scheme sent Croghan deeper into debt.

  The Mason-Dixon line had separated Pennsylvania from Maryland and Virginia but the western end of the line remained undetermined. The Treaty of Fort Stanwix also left Pennsylvania’s western boundary undetermined and Pennsylvania and Virginia contested a large area. In which colon
y, for example, did Fort Pitt fall? Pennsylvania took the position that the Stanwix treaty put the ceded lands at its disposal and immediately began surveying and settling lands in the area. Virginia insisted that the ceded territory lay within its borders. The Virginia governor Lord Dunmore’s chief agent in the region was Dr. John Connolly, who occupied Fort Pitt after British regulars abandoned it in 1772, and he renamed it Fort Dunmore. Connolly was George Croghan’s nephew.

  According to the historian Dorothy Jones, the Treaty of Fort Stanwix “closed the book on one era of treaty-making in early America and opened it on another.” Before Stanwix, treaties dealt with issues of trade, war and peace, alliances and relationships, and criminal jurisdiction, and they sometimes, but not always, transferred Indian lands into colonial hands. After Stanwix, treaties as conferences of accommodation disintegrated; more and more often, they became instruments for transferring land and as methods to separate Indians and Europeans.140 As Timothy Shannon puts it, the “simple equation of land for loot” established at Fort Stanwix “provided the template” by which the United States conducted its diplomacy with Indian nations in years to come, demanding land cessions in exchange for annuities of cash or goods that the Indians needed to sustain themselves as they were confined to small, unproductive reservations.141

  The Fort Stanwix treaty also accelerated a movement toward private land acquisition. The boundary that was meant to bring peace and order to the frontier in fact created conditions for conflict and confusion in which “the step from treaties as a public instrument of cession to treaties as a private instrument of cession was a very short step, and one easily taken.”142 Shifting intertribal power and politics, shifting British imperial policy, and unrelenting white expansion created chaos in the early 1770s. British actions in the wake of the treaty made things worse and contributed to the collapse of their empire in the Ohio Valley. When the government ordered Fort Pitt and Fort Chartres abandoned in 1771 as a measure of economy, it removed the British army as “a restraining power” in the region. At the same time, by failing to provide for limited land development beyond the proclamation line and by stalling indefinitely in giving approval to various proprietary schemes, “the ministry guaranteed that impatient, unscrupulous, or opportunistic adventurers would take the lead in western development and compound the confusions and conflicts that were already developing over western lands.”143

  The Stanwix cession unleashed an invasion of Indian country. In Virginia, veterans of the French and Indian War, with Washington at the forefront, asked the Executive Council for the land bounties they had been promised. Influential Virginians lobbied the Privy Council for rights to Kentucky and other lands that Virginia claimed by charter but which the suffering traders claimed were theirs. Samuel Wharton wrote a lengthy tract arguing that the territory west of the Alleghanies “never belonged to Virginia.” (He also argued that Indians had “an indefensible right freely to sell, and grant to any person whatsoever”—in other words the land grants to private individuals at Fort Stanwix were valid. As the law professor Blake Watson notes, those who defended the property rights of Indians were often those who were most eager to buy their lands.)144 The Penns opened their portion to settlement in April 1769 and received 2,790 applications for three-hundred-acre lots on the first day. Croghan reckoned between four and five thousand families crossed the mountains in 1769, and all spring and summer the next year the roads were “lined with wagons moving to the Ohio.” Alexander McKee, an agent in the Shawnee towns, reported that the flood of white settlers and surveyors in the country around Fort Pitt and down the Ohio “has set all their Warriors in a rage.”145 The Delaware chief Killbuck told the governors of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia that since the Stanwix treaty “great Numbers more of your People have come Over the Great Mountains and settled throughout this Country.” They were “very fond of our Rich Land,” constantly quarreling among themselves about land, and had had some violent quarrels with the Indians. Unless the governors found a way to control their people, the Indians would not be able to restrain their young men; “the black Clouds begin to gather fast in this Country,” Killbuck warned. The western Indians frequently heard of English meetings with the Six Nations and Cherokees “which gives us cause to think you are forming some bad designs against us Indians who Live between the Ohio and the Lakes.”146

  Even the Iroquois did not get the respite or benefit they hoped the treaty would bring them. Crops failed in 1769 and many Iroquois had to use the money they received at Fort Stanwix to buy provisions from colonial settlers to make it through the winter and spring.147 In July 1770, at a conference both Abraham and Conoghquieson attended, Johnson confirmed the treaty and the Iroquois reaffirmed their right to cede the western lands. But, Abraham reprimanded Johnson, “at the treaty of Fort Stanwix you then told us, as you had done before, that we should pass our time in peace, and travel in security, that Trade should flourish & goods abound; that they should be sold us cheap, & that care should be taken to prevent any persons from imposing on us.” Things had not worked out that way. “It is now worse than it was before.”148 Two years later, the Mohawks reminded Johnson that they had made the “great cession of Territory” to the king in expectation that their villages east of the line would be protected but now their lands were again under pressure from the people of Albany.149 The Iroquois position would soon deteriorate further.

  The harder the British and the Iroquois tried to maintain their influence and authority in the West, the faster it declined. Iroquois adherence to the British as a way of preserving their power among the western nations actually reduced it, as those nations became increasingly resentful of the British-Iroquois alliance. In selling their neighbors’ lands and protecting their own, the Iroquois forfeited their leadership role among the western tribes; in failing to protect the western tribes’ lands, the British forfeited their role as fathers. The Ohio nations denounced the treaty as a deal concocted between the British and the Iroquois to steal their lands. The Six Nations had given up their hunting grounds to the English without asking for their consent, they said, and “had Shamefully taken all the Money and Goods to themselves and not Shared any part thereof with them.” They called the Six Nations “slaves of the white people.” Young warriors said it was better to die like men than be kicked about like dogs.150

  Shawnee resentment of the Iroquois predated 1768 and ran deeper than the Fort Stanwix cession—they had voiced defiance of the Six Nations at Fort Pitt the spring before—but the treaty brought things to a head. The Shawnees became increasingly vocal and began to build a coalition of Indian nations that was independent of both the Iroquois and the British and opposed to the Stanwix cession. The Shawnee chief Red Hawk said the Six Nations had no more “right to sell the Country than we have.” The Shawnees had acknowledged the Iroquois as their elder brothers and listened to them while their advice was good, he said, but “their power extends no further with us.” Shawnee emissaries carrying wampum belts traveled north to the Great Lakes and south to Creek country and delegates from southern and western tribes gathered at “a very large Council House” that the Shawnees built on the banks of the Scioto River.151 “The scheme of the Shawnese to form a confederacy of all the Western and Southern nations is a notable piece of policy,” General Gage warned John Stuart, “for nothing less would enable them to withstand the Six Nations and their allies against whom they have been much exasperated on account of the boundary treaty held at Fort Stanwix.”152 As Shawnee emissaries reached out to Cherokees, Stuart informed his deputies that the Shawnees “are at the head of the Western confederacy which is formed upon the principle of maintaining their property in the lands obtained from the Six Nations at Fort Stanwix and prevent their being settled by white people.”153 Hillsborough became increasingly convinced of “the fatal Policy” of deviating from the proclamation line and feared the outbreak of a general Indian war.154

  The Shawnees also protested against the Cherokees selling lands in Ke
ntucky that they regarded as their hunting grounds. The boundary lines that were agreed upon by the Iroquois and the Cherokees converged on the Ohio River. In the words of the late historian Wilbur Jacobs, the lines “silhouetted a huge geographical arrowhead directed to the heartland of America.”155 Whites entered the arrowhead confident that their invasion was legal; Shawnees who had never relinquished the land treated them as trespassers. Daniel Boone was one of the first intruders. In 1769 with half a dozen men, he crossed from North Carolina through the Cumberland Gap and spent the summer hunting in the game-filled forests of northern Kentucky. The Shawnees caught them, confiscated their furs and guns, and sent them home. Boone sneaked back into Kentucky the next spring, and in 1773, he sold his farm in North Carolina and led five families and forty single men through Cumberland Gap. A war party of Cherokees and Shawnees ambushed them and killed six people, including Boone’s eldest son, James. Boone’s party retreated but regrouped and returned two years later.156